Jason Dunn
03-29-2007, 08:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130216-c,intel/article.html' target='_blank'>http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130216-c,intel/article.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Intel Corp. will begin producing its next-generation "Penryn" processors by the end of 2007, using greater power efficiency to push improved Core 2 and Xeon chips to speeds over 3GHz, the company said Wednesday...In other improvements, Intel will use 50 percent more on-chip memory in Penryn chips than Core 2 Duo, allowing them to hold more data on the chip instead of spending time and energy retrieving it from the PC's main memory bank. Dual-core Penryn chips will have 6M bytes of L2 cache while quad-core versions have 12M bytes. Intel said it also will speed Penryn front side bus speeds to 1600MHz, instead of the 1066MHz or 1333MHz options now available, granting up to a 45 percent improvement for high-performance computing applications like computational fluid dynamics."</i><br /><br />Excuse me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard - Intel is unleashing a stunning wave of improved CPUs in 2007 and beyond, and the changes are much more than simple bumps in clock speed. Every time I work with RAW images or transcode video, I wish for a faster CPU. Bring it on!